Thought this article may be useful to many....

If you’re playing on an outdated PC your dad found in the back of his garage, no worries. Right here you will find 10 free, quick & easy tips to improve your gaming performance. So sit back, and open up your brain tank because here comes some premium 97 knowledge.

Improve PC performance

1. Set battery to high performance

This first tip to improve PC performance will only applies to the laptop users among us. It sounds evident to do so, but some people forget (like I have, playing TF2 on 15 FPS on my 6 months old rig). So click on that battery icon on the bottom left, and when it shows options between “Energy Saving” and “Lenovo Dynamic Graphics”, I’d suggest you click the latter. Also, be sure to hit “More Power Options”, you never know if there is a hidden gaming option in there.



2. Improve your GPU PC performance by installing a Game Booster

What is a Game Booster you might ask? Wikipedia might say that it’s a software, designed to speed up your PC for faster, smoother, more responsive game performance. It does this by shutting down any obsolete programs running in the background, making your PC focus all its attention and power to the game you are playing. You can download a great Game Booster for free from Razer!

3. Clean up your PC

I recommend that you run this free little program called Ccleaner from the friendly people of Piriform every month. It fastens your PC by cleaning all areas of your computer, like your internet temporary files, history (always useful, hehe), cookies, etc. It also cleans old or unused registries which might hinder your performance. If all this sounded like jibberish to you, just download the program, run it, and watch as 5-10 GB of crap gets flushed down the toilet that your PC has been holding back for years. He’ll thank you for it.



4. Updating your drivers

Drivers are computer programs that let Windows and your other applications interact with a hardware device. Basically, your hardware speaks Chinese, your software American, so to let them interact, you need a driver, who speaks both! Magic. If you want your driver to stay up to date to the latest language changes (this metaphor is running dry, but bear with me), you need to upgrade them once and a while. For gaming, the most important ones are your graphics card and processor drivers. You should always download them from the manufacturer himself! So here are some handy dandy links to NVIDIA, ATI/AMDÂ and Intel. If you’re not sure what hardware you are running, you can check it when you open Ccleaner, on the top.



5. Set graphics card to high performance

Look in your graphic card settings, somewhere in the 3D-settings most likely, and switch it from “High Quality” to “High Performance”.



http://www.lowspecgaming.com/improve-pc-performance/

6. Overclocking

A very popular method to get 5-10 extra FPS without many expenses. Overclocking basically pushes your graphics card or processor to work just a little bit harder. This sounds dangerous, and it CAN BE! As long as you don’t go overboard, you should be fine though. It’s not that difficult, but I suggest you check out these full articles about overclocking your graphics card and processor, so you don’t end up killing your PC.

7. Adjust in-game settings

This tip is the most obvious one, but also probably the most effective so I just have to include it. Tweaking your in-game graphics settings until you get a smooth experience is a must. Lowering screen resolution, shadow quality, texture quality, view distance, etc.. will all increase the game performance immensely, so do it.



8. Defrag your hard drive

This will help your entire PC’s performance, it’s a maintenance task required by your hard drives. So how can you do it?

Windows XP: open My Computer and right-click on the C: drive. Select Properties, then click on the Tools tab and select Defragment Now
Windows 7: open up the Start menu and type “defrag.” In windows 7, defragmentation should go automatically, but it’s always best to check if everything is running as intended.
Windows 8: don’t worry about it, it happens automatically (Windows 8 isn’t all bad, guys!)



9. Patch your game

Sometimes it actually isn’t you, it’s him. Patching a game might resolve performance issues of the game itself, but also the way it interacts with your PC. It happens that patches come out that optimize the game with your super duper gaming rig, so be sure to check out the official game website and see if there’s nothing you can download.

10. Remember: bottlenecks

Tip 10 isn’t really something you can actually do, but rather something you have to keep in mind while tweaking your PC (and 10 tips always sound nicer than 9, right?). It’s bottlenecks, and what I mean by that is, your PC is only as strong as it’s weakest part. If you have a top-notch processor and 16 GB of RAM, but your graphics card is an INTEL 2000, you should try and optimize the latter (by overclocking it for example). It might also be better to play games that require more speed, rather than a great GPU (eg. Starcraft 2, World of Warcraft, CIV 5, Battlefield 3, GTA 4, Flight Simulators, Bad Company 2. Don’t ask me why, just accept it).

Conclusion

There are many things you can do to squeeze every last bit of gaming performance out of your PC until it’s as dry as the eczema on my forehead. Not all tips will help everyone in the same way, but they are all free and relatively easy, so nothing is stopping you from trying! So take these tips to heart, and start tweaking!

http://www.lowspecgaming.com/freeperformanceboost5to10/

thanks op.